BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. the guidance of her academic mentor, Eduardo Llanos Melussa. Her interest in

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1 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Claudia A. Barriga was born in Chicago in 1972, where her father was pursuing a Ph.D. in Mathematics, but her roots and hometown are in Santiago, Chile. She got her undergraduate degree in Psychology at the Universidad Diego Portales, where she also received professional qualification as a Clinical Psychologist. She has worked as a counselor and a school psychologist, but found herself more interested in her work as teaching assistant and instructor of Psychology of Communication, under the guidance of her academic mentor, Eduardo Llanos Melussa. Her interest in Communication as a field that could breach gaps between psychology and media studies led her to pursue a graduate degree at Cornell University. Claudia is presently working towards completing her doctoral program at Cornell. iii

2 Esta tesis esta dedicada a mi familia: a mi mamá, a mi hermana Paula y a Gabriel, porque está aquí gracias a ellos, como yo. iv

3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It is customary in this section to acknowledge and thank one s advisor. I doubt that there can ever be an instance in which it will be more heartfelt and deserved than it is here. The amount of patience, tolerance and faith that Prof. Mike Shapiro had towards me, at moments in which he had no reason to, make my gratitude a small retribution. He allowed me to pursue an uncommon topic in an uncommon way, gave me good advice that I did not always follow, and was also flexible enough to let me try out my ideas. More importantly, he inadvertently encouraged me to persist in my academic pursuit. I am very grateful for his support through difficult times. I thank Prof. Dawn Schrader, who is not only the person that has taught my favorite class at Cornell so far, but has also showed support and enthusiasm for my ideas, and has strengthened my interest in integrating different approaches to research. I also thank Prof. Bruce Lewenstein, for his willingness to join my committee at a special time, for his good suggestions, questions and comments, and for all his help as Director of Graduate Studies. Likewise, I would like to thank Prof. Joe Walther, who gave me valuable advice in the beginnings of this project. Courtney E. Silver acted as the coder of my initial content analysis. Without her help coding and recoding when things did not work out well, this study would not have been possible. Tracy Loh, the coder for my post hoc analysis, must be thanked not only for her generosity in doing this, but also for hearing me out through many moments of despair and frustration with this work. Of course, I thank my friends in Ithaca and in Chile, because each and every one of them, at one moment or another, helped me out with this, and I love them all. As for José Miguel, I will hope that he knows how much of this work saw the light just because he is there to show me what a good person is in real life, with all its ambiguities. v

4 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction The influence of stories on moral thought Recognizing the moral dimension in movies Will any kind of moral thought make you virtuous? The object of moral thoughts The influence of moral thoughts in our enjoyment of stories Moral ambiguity: Are all stories the same? Categorization of movies according to moral ambiguity Variables of Interest: Are all comments with moral content the same? Object of Reference Dimension of Appraisal Valence and Kind of Utterance Methods Sample and Corpus of Films Source of the Data Data Set Selection of Films Coding Scheme Development Procedure Results General Thoughts about Movies Coding Dimension of Appraisal 49 vi

5 3.1.3 Object of Reference Kind of Utterance Valence Moral Thoughts Differences according to Moral Ambiguity Hypothesis Testing Object of Reference: Sender and Receiver Morality Thoughts Post-Hoc Analyses Discussion Who can be affected by moral issues in narratives? Importance of moral elements beyond the plot Moral complexity as a cue to evaluate film quality Other results Disadvantages and Advantages of the study Disadvantages Advantages Appendix: Plot Summaries for the Corpus of Movies References 83 vii

6 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Number of Thoughts per Dimension of Appraisal 50 Figure 2. Number of Thoughts per Object of Reference 51 Figure 3. Number of Thoughts per Kind of Utterance 51 Figure 4. Number of Thoughts per Valence 52 Figure 5. Number of Moral Thoughts per Object of Reference 53 Figure 6. Moral thoughts per Kind of Utterance 54 Figure 7. Number of Moral Thoughts per Valence 54 Figure 8. Number of Moral Thoughts per Reviewer 56 Figure 9. Presence or Absence of Moral Thoughts, for Unambiguous, Ambiguous and Non-morally centered movies 59 viii

7 LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Movie Categorization according to Moral Template 39 Table 2. Criteria to Code the Variable Dimension of Appraisal 44 Table 3. Criteria to Code the Variable Object of Reference 46 Table 4. Criteria for Coding the Variable Valence 46 Table 5. Criteria to code the Variable Kind of Utterance 47 ix

8 Introduction Moral stories are common in movies and television. Viewers are often exposed to tales that show moral choices, moral conflicts or direct moral lessons. Cold Mountain shows moral choices that common men and women have to make at times of war: is it ok to steal? Desert the army? Kill in self defense? The Last Samurai presents the way in which a man follows his own moral code in the face of adversity. The Life of David Gale tells the story of how a group of characters face the problem of the death penalty. For centuries scholars have assumed that the moral elements in stories can influence our thoughts and behaviors. This assumption has tended to generate concern that movies have negative effects on people s values and moral behavior For example, Rockwell and Bryant examined the possibility that exposure to television with sexual indiscretion made teenagers more prone to consider them acceptable (Rockwell & Bryant, 1994). Narvaez (1999) finds that the combination of adolescent moral development and movies with rebel heroes may be a toxic one. It is often assumed that part of this influence of movies works unconsciously ; we may be influenced without even noticing it. However, there is also the less studied possibility that this influence occurs through conscious thinking about the moral issues presented in movies. This study focuses on conscious thoughts about movies, and the role they play in our movie watching experience. I decided to do research on this topic after finishing a study consisting of a discourse analysis of movies about psychotherapy (Barriga, 2001). One of the main findings was that moral elements of the relation between therapist and patient was a central issue to the plot, and that it was dealt with in complex and sometimes ambiguous ways, to the point that it was hard for me, as a viewer, to determine what was right and wrong within the context of the story. It seemed to me that these movies 1

9 enclosed a complex message and offered the viewer an opportunity for in depth reflection about some moral conflicts and dilemmas that they might face in a therapeutic situation, whether they were therapists or clients. I wondered if common viewers were able to grasp the moral complexity and took the chance to reflect on these issues. This led, with time, to a more general question. Do people, when confronted to the moral dimension that is central to many movies, take the chance to process this thoughtfully and challenge their current structure of moral thinking? A question that comes even earlier is: do people think about moral issues at all? A review of research in this area showed that there is very little research that looks at what people consciously think about while viewing films with moral content. We do not actually know if people think about the moral element at all. This study is a first attempt at finding out if people think consciously about moral elements in movies, and to explore what kinds of moral thoughts emerge. This is, in my opinion, a first step towards knowing whether people are close to using movies as a tool to reflect upon their own moral beliefs and developments. A better understanding of conscious moral thoughts about movies would probably be helpful to understand the mechanisms by which people are morally influenced by movies, if at all. It would also help to better understand the role of moral thoughts in the appreciation of stories in general, beyond moral damage or moral growth. This study intends to answer these questions by exploring a sample of online reviewers comments for 14 contemporary movies on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), an extensive website devoted to film. The IMDb reviews allow us to examine thoughts about movies that were produced in a natural setting 1 ; an advantage in terms 1 There may be questions raised about the ethics of content analyzing data posted on the world wide web. I take the stance that reviews published in the IMDb are public information, in the same way that an article in a newspaper, or even the section of letters to the editor in a newspaper or magazine are. 2

10 of knowing whether people think of moral issues at all after they watch fictional films in their everyday lives. The idea that stories can have a moral influence is an old one, beginning with Aristotle claiming that a fable with a moral can make people virtuous. This idea has led to some research on the way in which people are morally influenced by stories. I will examine this research to see what it tells us about the ways in which people are affected by moral stories in terms of positive moral development and/or negative moral effects. This requires an examination of some current ideas about moral psychology and moral development. The content analysis performed in this study will then examine whether the moral thoughts of the online reviewers behave like the moral thoughts discussed by these theories of psychological moral development. Another line of research assumes that people are always thinking morally while they watch movies, and that these moral judgments are linked to their enjoyment of the film. I will examine this theory to see what role it assigns to moral thoughts, what evidence it provides that people think of movies morally, and what kinds of moral thoughts it assumes that people are making. The content analysis will then examine whether the online reviewers are thinking of the movies in a way that fits with those notions of the role of moral thoughts. A review of this literature leads to a realization that some questions can be raised about the way research in this area has been conducted so far. Particularly, some issues have been neglected. Most of the research has focused on stories that are very simple: good guys and bad guys. This study proposes that many movies are morally complex, and that research that accommodates that moral complexity is Newspapers are commonly content analyzed, and I assume that it is acceptable to do so with these data, which is public to anyone online (the website does not even require registration or a password). Of course, I also take the precaution of protecting the individual identities of the posters. Their tag names are not disclosed, and I have tried to minimize the use of direct quotes that could lead to their tracking and identification. 3

11 needed. I will devote a section to define these different levels of moral complexity in stories. Another problem is that the research on moral thoughts has focused almost exclusively on people s thoughts about the characters and plot of a story. It is necessary to incorporate other elements that people might be thinking about, including the creators of the movie, the general audience, themselves, and other elements. The Influence of Stories on Moral Thought The interest in people s interpretations of moral issues in stories has been present since ancient times. The most evident example of this is the existence of fables and their often explicit morals. From ancient times children have been told stories in fable form, with their explicit moral, assuming that this will carry on to their moral development and behavior. Aristotle claimed hat any story is a form of moral argument, and that understanding this moral argument of stories could help to make us all more virtuous. In modern days, moralists like William Bennett (1993) publish collections of moral stories for children and adults, to act as a guide for moral selfimprovement. Such endeavors seem to assume that being exposed to a moral argument in narrative form would, per se, be helpful to our moral development. Several professional education institutions concerned with developing the ethical sensibilities of their future graduates have created ethics courses that use narratives. These projects use films or stories that present ethical issues associated with the profession (business, psychiatry, medicine, dentistry, etc.) and then have discussion sessions about these issues (Williams, 1998; Rudin, Edelson & Servis, 1998; Hunter, Charon & Coulehan, 1996; Crellin & Briones, 1996). The evaluations of these projects show that they do produce an increase in the level of complexity with which the students deal with ethical issues. Conscious discussion of the issues seems to be crucial for this improvement to occur. Indeed, one would think that a positive 4

12 moral effect would not happen if the reader or viewer did not at least think and elaborate about the morality of the story. Being merely exposed to the story would not be enough. Thus, my study focuses on conscious moral thoughts about movies, with the understanding that conscious moral thought is key if moral improvement is to be found. Do conscious thoughts about morality appear if there is no one there to point out the moral elements of a film? It may be relevant at this point to examine what is meant by moral improvement in the context of present day social sciences, and why exactly it is that the presence of conscious thoughts is an important element to keep in mind. Does moral improvement mean that people change from bad values to good values, they go from being bad to being better? One clue to answer this question comes from the literature in moral psychology and moral development. This literature is not only about the values themselves, but about the way people think about moral problems and decisions, and how that thinking changes as a person develops through his/her lifetime. The approach assumes that throughout the course of their lifetime, people s conceptions of what is right or wrong not only changes, but develops into broader and more complex understandings of the elements that come into play when making judgments and decisions about what is right and wrong. Historically, the starting point of this tradition is in the work of Jean Piaget (1932) who, through observation of his own children (and later thousands of other children) determined three different stages of cognitive development, and corresponding stages of moral development. One of Piaget s more important realizations was that children, as they grow up, change the criteria through which they determine whether actions were good or bad. The approach of very young children to morality is based on the concrete consequences of the action: if someone is 5

13 hurt, or something is destroyed, then there was a moral fault committed, and the gravity of the fault is directly proportional to the extent of the damage. As children grow up, they learn to consider intentionality of the actor as a key element to determine whether they have done right or wrong. The actual action and its consequences are not as important as the intentions behind the actor. For example, if I hurt someone badly, but accidentally, I am not bad any longer, whereas if I hurt someone a little, but intentionally, I may be considered a wrongdoer (Piaget, 1932; Lapsley, 1996). Kohlberg (1976), who reformulated and extended Piaget s work to explain moral development after adolescence, also includes the focus on rewards and punishments as a characteristic of primitive stages of moral development, In general, only young children will tend to make moral judgments based on whether an action was punished or not, or on whether it had individual negative consequences or not. According to Kohlberg s description of moral development, after these initial stages in which morality is based on punishment and rewards, and as people learn to consider the viewpoints of others and of society at large, they reach higher stages of cognitive moral development. First, they will judge moral behavior to be the one that protects and respects close relationships, then the one that follows social rules and norms that are beneficial to societal operations, and finally the one that is guided by higher order principles, namely justice, respect for human life and egalitarianism (Kohlberg, 1976). Although this is just a rough summary of Kohlberg s main ideas, it is enough to convey a couple of points about moral psychology that are relevant to this study. The first one is that people may achieve different levels of moral thought at different times of their lives, and that these different levels of moral development can be considered as different cognitive structures; like different sets of cognitive tools that people have to think about moral dilemmas. Moral development, according to these 6

14 scholars, is not entirely about finding out the right values, it is also about thinking of those values in a broader, more complex way. Moral development would be, to an extent, cognitive development. It is about how we think. As is the case with other aspects of cognitive development, or general change in cognitive structures, people need to be exposed to information that is conflictive or challenging of their current structures in order to begin the process of restructuring their set of cognitive tools (Piaget, 1932; Tappan, 1998). This is the mechanism we would expect to be behind moral development through stories. If people are faced with, for example, a story that presents a morality issue in a light that is conflictive with their existing cognitive structures to think about morality, one would hope they engage in a thoughtful process that could (though not necessarily would) lead to a structural change (Piaget, 1932; Lapsley, 1996). If people are presented a story in which moral issues and their resolution is consistent with their moral structures of thought, then one might would expect little thoughtful processing of that information, and probably no change in cognitive structures. This leads to the hypothesis that more explicit thoughts about morality will appear when people comment about movies that present moral complexity or ambiguity (I will define these movies later), because such morally complex movies are more likely to present moral issues in a way that is not consistent with the viewer s current moral structures. Recognizing the moral dimension in movies Of course, in order to actually produce conscious moral thoughts, people would have to recognize that there are moral elements present in the movie. Is this likely to happen? Actually, we do not know. People, regardless of their level of moral development, might still not reflect upon moral issues at all when exposed to a movie. They might fail to recognize the moral issues implied within the plot, they might fail 7

15 to deal with a movie as if it was a moral dilemma or presented one. Most research conducted under the Kohlbergian paradigm has been based on presenting people with brief story-like moral dilemmas, in which people are explicitly asked to make a moral decision, and in which the moral nature of the story is very clear and explicit. The moral nature of the story is clear because of the experimental context, the questions asked or the characteristics of the story itself. It has been proposed that before people can actually think morally about a real life dilemma, they must first recognize the moral implications of a situation (Rest, 1984). However, not all real life situations are built in such ways that we can recognize the moral aspects involved. Likewise, in complicated narratives such as movies, spectators do not necessarily have to acknowledge the moral aspects of the plot to understand it or be entertained. Thus, it is an open question whether people will recognize the moral issues involved in any movie at all. And this is a relevant question, because just as identifying moral issues is the first step towards high order moral behavior, it might also be the first step towards high order moral thought, and thus the possibility of moral change and development. Therefore, it speaks directly to the old assumption, being questioned and explored here, that merely being exposed to moral stories can help the spectator be more virtuous. At this point it might be important to clarify an important distinction for this study; the one between moral thoughts that are prompted in some way by an experimenter, teacher or other person, and those moral thoughts that people may have spontaneously when exposed to a narrative. A fair amount of research on the area of moral psychology and morality focuses on prompted thoughts: people are presented with either a story like dilemma (the Kohlbergian approach, followed by Rest) or a story proper and asked specifically to evaluate the moral aspects of the plot. The advantages of this, proposed initially by Kohlberg (Colby & Kohlberg, 1987), are that 8

16 prompted thoughts can make people respond using their highest levels of cognitive moral competence (the moral complexities and issues they can at least understand, regardless of whether they are the ones used by them in daily life), whereas spontaneous thoughts would just reflect what Colby and Kohlberg call the hard stages ; those moral structures of understanding that come to people automatically, even if they are not the highest they can produce (Lapsley, 1996). Of course, if one s intended applications are educational or developmental, as is the case with much of the research conducted in these traditions (Williams, 1998; Rudin, Edelson & Servis, 1998; Hunter, Charon & Coulehan, 1996; Crellin & Briones, 1996), knowing just what the highest level of understanding of people is of great importance. According to modern constructivist learning theory, one needs to know people s zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978): that which a person can achieve with the help of others, but not by themselves. Clearly, if one thinks of an educational application for encouraging moral development, prompting the highest levels of moral thought that a person can produce and understand is important. The teacher or mediator will be there to help the subject deal with the difficulties of the high stage, and prompt its stabilization. This study, however, focuses on spontaneous thoughts, those that according to Colby and Kohlberg (1978) can only tell us about hard stages: those thoughts that come to people easily, and are probably the ones most in use in their everyday lives. Thus I am interested in thoughts that are both conscious and readily available to people in their everyday lives. These would be the thoughts we expect to appear when people produce an informal movie review. Let us remember that one of the issues that communication has been concerned with is the possible influence of media messages on people, particularly considering that there are no major mediating steps between the self and the exposure to the 9

17 message. Namely: I see a movie and rarely is there any prompt or mediator to make me thing about specific issues, much less in an educational way. This is particularly so for adults. (We can assume that at least some children and teenagers get mediated experiences of the media, through their parents or the educational institutions they belong to). However, what happens once there are no longer such natural mediators, and, at the same time, adults are faced with mediated messages of higher levels of complexity? We know that people can completely neglect issues that are clearly present and relevant in a message if they are not prompted to find them and are rather left to their spontaneous evaluations (see Livingstone, 1989, for people s neglect of the issue of social class in soap operas). We also know that people are not necessarily good at detecting moral elements of news stories and news stories production if they are not made salient (Rebecca A. Lind, 1997; R. A. Lind & Rarick, 1999; Rebecca A. Lind, Swenson-Lepper, & Rarick, 1998). By examining the spontaneous moral thoughts that viewers produce when commenting different types of movies, we can know something more about people s moral processing of messages in natural environments, as opposed to experimental or educational settings. Will any kind of moral thought make you virtuous? As has been noted, it is important to discover whether people even think spontaneously of moral issues when watching movies. It is also important to find out how they think about moral issues when they do. A further exploration of some research on moral development and narratives shows that not just any moral thought is likely to lead to moral self improvement. The content analysis presented here can then contrast the moral thoughts reviewers produce with the ones that would be more likely to have a positive influence on moral development. 10

18 One way in which contemporary authors have approached the understanding of Kohlbergian moral stages, is to think of them as cognitive schemas. Cognitive schemas are defined as domain specific structures that allow us to know what to expect in a certain situation, and what elements to consider in that situation. They are cognitive structures that represent knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus, including its attributes and the relationship among the attributes (Fiske & Taylor, 1991, p.139). The classic definition of schema comes from studies in narrative interpretation (Bartlett, 1933). These studies showed that people interpret ambiguous story elements by inserting what they would expect in a particular story in their culture. Within the realm of morality and moral development, schemata are supposed to shed light on the issues that people consider when they process a moral dilemma: a person who is at a stage of moral development that involves considering the effects of an action on interpersonal relationships may be very aware of relational issues involved in a dilemma, but ignore normative societal issues. This provides an interesting way to understand people s approach to moral issues in narratives. In studies with small children, eighth graders and college students, Narvaez and her colleagues have found that moral stories are understood in different ways depending on the reader s cognitive abilities in reading comprehension and on their different moral schemas (Narvaez, 1998, 2001, 2002; Narvaez, Gleason, Mitchell, & Bentley, 1999). People will be more likely to recall the moral arguments that are coherent with their schemas and cognitive development, disregard others even when they are present, add their own arguments even when absent in the story, and ignore the intended moral message of the author if it is incoherent with the cognitive and moral structures available to them (Narvaez, 1998, 2001, 2002). People may be thinking about a story morally, but will do so in terms of their own ideas and cognitive structures, to the point that the author s intended moral message of the movie may be 11

19 completely neglected. In terms of Piaget s cognitive theories, this would be a case of assimilation (assimilating the new information to the old cognitive structures), instead of accommodation (reforming the cognitive structures to accommodate for the new information). Perhaps even more interesting, from the point of view of my intended study, is that people have different levels of reading comprehension and interpretation of moral issues in stories depending on their reading purposes, such as entertainment vs. study (Narvaez, van den Broek, & Ruiz, 1999). In this case, the purpose of the activity of reading would be acting as the leading schema, instead of the stage of moral development being the schema. This is quite relevant when we think of people s spontaneous appraisal of movies, because it may mean that people s moral thoughts (if any) depend on what their goals are when they approach the movie viewing experience. If their goal is solely entertainment, their level of moral processing and interpretation may be quite different than if they conceive of movies as an opportunity for insight, introspection and growth. We know that people may approach films with either of these motives, and more. Thus I would expect to see some variation in presence of moral reflections or thoughts, and in the role these thoughts play for each viewer. I also might expect different kinds of movies to create different expectations (Bruner, 1986), such that maybe simple movies, with a stereotypical or unambiguous approach to moral conflict, would elicit more relaxation/entertainment expectations, whereas more complex movies, presenting moral ambiguity of some kind might generate expectations associated with personal insight, elaboration or reflection. The kind of movie may have an influence on the viewing purpose. Thus I may expect moral thoughts about movies to correspond to different kinds of viewing goals, as well as to different attitudes towards challenging moral content (assimilation vs. accommodation). 12

20 The object of moral thoughts We may also expect to see a difference in the object of people s moral reflections once these moral reflections emerge in the reviews. People may focus their moral commentary on the plot of the movie and its characters, or they may focus on the movie s authors (producer, director, even actors). Some evidence on how such different objects of moral reflection may appear stems from research on people s ethical sensitivity to news reporting. This line of research follows viewers reactions to news stories that can be seen as involving ethical issues, such as political or sexual scandals. It measures the level of the audiences ethical sensitivity ; this is, to what level they are able to perceive the ethical issues involved in a news story, the people that it may affect or help, and the consequences that it may have (R. A. Lind & Rarick, 1999; McAlister, 2000). This is one of the few lines of research that I found that has incorporated the difference between moral thought about the story itself, and moral thought about the way the story is told. The results of this line of research show that people are better at distinguishing ethically relevant issues of the story itself (content) than at perceiving ethical issues involved in reporting the news story in a certain manner. These results hold true across news stories about different topics (e.g. the Clinton scandal, a sensationalistic report of a child accident, an investigative report about real estate practices). The research also establishes individual differences in ethical sensitivity, such that some people are more likely than others to consider ethical issues, whether about the story s content or the manner of the reporting itself (Lind, 1997; Lind & Rarick, 1999; Lind, Swenson-Lepper, & Rarick, 1998). In general, their results show that people tend not to raise ethical issues that are relevant to the story but not salient in the news: the ethical issues must be made salient in some way for people to pick 13

21 them up (Lind, 1997). This research indicates that the news story must make moral issues salient in order to get the viewer to think about them. More importantly in terms of my goals, this research shows that people are capable of making moral comments about different objects in a story: the news story itself and the reporting of the story. Moral thoughts about the manner of reporting are, in a way, moral thoughts about the story s source. In the case of movies, the equivalent would be moral thoughts about the creators of the film. Other possible objects of moral thought (the audience, the reviewer him/herself) can also be expected to emerge in the reviews. The influence of moral thoughts in our enjoyment of stories Until now I have been considering the way in which moral thoughts may lead or not towards moral development or moral awareness. However, there are other roles that moral thoughts may be playing when we watch movies or listen to stories. Producing moral thoughts may be necessary for us to enjoy dramatic movies, regardless of movie s effects on our moral development. Zillmann s Disposition Theory of Drama Enjoyment (1994, 2000) states exactly this. According to this theory, viewers are constant moral monitors of dramatic movies. Viewers constantly make moral judgments about who is good, and who is bad. These moral judgments determine their liking of a character (good characters are liked, bad ones disliked) and the viewer will enjoy the drama to the extent that good characters are rewarded and bad characters are punished. The theory does not concern itself with the moral effect of movies, but it does propose that people are constantly thinking morally about dramatic films. Does this mean that a content analysis like the one I present here should find a large number of moral statements? Not necessarily. Disposition Theory research has 14

22 dealt with these constant moral judgments as automatic and implicit judgments, which are guiding other evaluation processes. Typically, researchers interested in this approach will manipulate a message to ensure a certain moral judgment (by making the characters thoroughly good or evil), then assume that the judgment took place (using a manipulation check), and finally showing that this implicit judgment is accountable for other behaviors exhibited by a reader/viewer, such as their reported enjoyment. One of the classic studies in this line of research manipulated the moral judgment orientation by having fairy tales in which the characters behavior was either thoroughly good or thoroughly evil (Bryant & Zillmann, 1975). Such a manipulation guarantees an automatic implicit moral judgment: children exposed to these stories could not but judge characters as good or evil. The experimental paradigm produces an automatic and probably implicit judgment that then guides the child s enjoyment of the story, such that when characters get what they deserve, the story is enjoyed. Most research developing disposition theory follows this paradigm. More recently, Raney (2002; Raney & Bryant, 2002) has developed a way of testing disposition theory with actual TV content. The studies manipulate clips from crime drama series to leave cues to the goodness or badness of the characters in or out. The severity of the crimes committed and of the punishments received is also manipulated. This allows more complicated experimental designs in which an overall measure of appropriate retributive justice can be had. Still, the moral judgments that the viewers make, which in turn lead to their enjoyment of the clips, are assumed to be implicit and automatic, and they are expected to follow the direction of the manipulation. Even if the participants have had more complex thoughts about the moral behavior of the characters in the clips, or moral thoughts about the intentions of the message, the producers of the message, or the audience that the message was designed for, the 15

23 experiment does not offer an instance for measuring them. Explicit conscious moral thoughts are ignored. For purposes of this study, I will distinguish between such automatic implicit judgments, and relatively more thoughtful explicit judgments, like the ones accessible through the IMDb User Comments Board. Instead of asking about the potential effects of an implicit moral judgment on narratives, I ask what kinds of explicit moral thoughts people make when confronted to a narrative. Although implicit moral judgments have definitely been found to be a good predictor of enjoyment in certain contexts, they can t say much about the impact of narratives on thoughts about morality itself. An exploration of people s explicit thoughts may be a better indication of the thoughts that viewers take with them from a movie, and later discuss with friends or reflect upon. There are two ways in which Disposition Theory research connects to our study. First, I propose that just like implicit moral judgments are found to be a tool to understand the entertainment aspects of some narratives, explicit moral thoughts may be found to shed more light on the contribution of narratives to development of morally complex thought, as proposed in moral development theory. Secondly, even if moral judgments were irrelevant to moral development, and I was only interested in enjoyment of movies, an examination of explicit moral thoughts could say something more about the enjoyment process. Explicit judgments, then, are at least conscious enough to be expressed verbally, and subject to all the possible processes of elaboration and complexity that that entails. I do realize that they involve processes of self-censorship and, on the other hand, may be motivated by self-presentation issues. Thus, these thoughts do not tell everything that goes through people s minds in terms of moral judgment, nor do they necessarily give the best approximation to their first moral reaction. They do, 16

24 however, say a lot about people s conscious conceptualizations of the moral impact of the film, whether on themselves or others, and I believe that they are a good entry to the ways in which moral themes in movies have an impact on people s moral development or change. Moral Ambiguity: Are all stories the same? Most of the research I have described so far deals with a certain structure of story: one in which there are good guys and bad guys (Raney, 2002; Raney & Bryant, 2002; Zillmann, 1994, 2000; Zillmann & Bryant, 1975). Research that studies the effect of stories on children s morality uses the same paradigm of extreme good and extreme bad (Krcmar & Cooke, 2001; Krcmar & Valkenburg, 1999). Are stories in the real world like this? One way to look at this is to see if there is a standard template for movie morality. There has been some work devoted to unraveling the main template of moral messages in the media, in order to then examine whether this supposed generalized template has an effect on people s moral views. Two main questions have been asked. The first one inquires what are the main values conveyed by the media system. The second question attempts to find out whether there is a generalized moral template guiding fictional media messages, in which good always wins over evil. Results are conflicting for both issues. There is some evidence that TV presents mainstream American values (Selnow, 1986; 1990) defined broadly as good winning over evil, honesty, etc. For example, moral violations in soap operas (infidelity, corruption) are punished in the long run (Sutherland & Siniawsky, 1982). However, Potter (Potter et al., 1995) presents conflicting evidence by finding no support for the presence of a "morality play template" in a sample of entertainment television involving aggression (good does not consistently win over evil in his sample of aggressive television). The 17

25 findings fail in their attempt to discover one main moral template in the system of narratives (movies and television mainly) to which Americans are exposed daily. It must be noted that by morality template we refer here to the basic Aristotelian notion that, in a narrative, good must always win over evil in the end: otherwise there is a violation of justice and the main moral- purpose of the narrative genre is not fulfilled. The fact that researchers have failed to find a generalized morality template of this sort is not necessarily surprising. The sheer number and variety of messages that we are exposed to daily guarantees the difficulty of finding one main moral template. Given this diversity, one of the goals of this study is to shed some light on how people may think differently about movies that have different moral templates, this is, different ways of dealing with good and evil in their plots. This should, in turn, help better understand what kinds of moral development possibilities and insights we can expect people to have, given the broad spectrum of ways in which movies deal with moral issues. The incorporation of different kinds of movies with different approaches to moral issues is relevant not only because studies of people s reception and interpretation of moral issues in media messages is scarce (Rosenkoetter, 2001), but, more importantly, because if we assume that moral development is indeed influenced by narratives, then the way in which the moral influence occurs for different kinds of narratives should be accounted for. Thus, my goal is to examine whether people do spontaneously have conscious thoughts about moral issues in film, as common sense knowledge has assumed for centuries; and also how those spontaneous thoughts may vary depending on the kind of moral templates that the movie presents. I attempt to achieve this goal by content analyzing informal online reviewers spontaneous and explicit thoughts on a sample of dramatic movies. The content analysis intends to examine whether people have 18

26 spontaneous thoughts about moral issues in movies, what kinds of moral thoughts they are, and how those moral thoughts differ depending on the moral template of the movie. Because the study is interested in spontaneous and explicit thoughts, as in unprompted by questions, instructions or a general research context, I chose to develop it by examining people s comments in a naturalistic setting. The chosen setting is a website devoted to film and movies: the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Categorization of Movies According to Moral Ambiguity I defined three kinds of movies, depending on the way in which their plot deals with moral issues: movies that are morally unambiguous, movies that are morally ambiguous, and movies that are not morally centered. As I just discussed, Potter (1995) was unable to find support for the existence of one main morality template in a sample of television fictional programs involving aggression. By morality template Potter meant mainly a narrative template in which good won over evil in the end. Of course, such a template requires that good and evil are easily recognizable and identifiable in the narrative. This is often the case in a certain kind of narrative, namely, one where there are good guys, who are sympathetic and right, and whose actions can always be morally justified. Classic examples are the hero movies, in which a good super hero (Superman), that does nothing but good, faces an archenemy that does nothing but evil. Even if the hero engages in morally reprehensible behavior, such as violence (killing others or destroying property), it is always because the archenemy threatens with an even greater danger, and shows unjustified evil intent. There are more subtle versions of this unambiguous template: ones in which human characters, who are flawed, manage nevertheless to resist temptations and make the right decisions in the end, always in the face of an antagonist who justifies any wrongs that may be committed. In these cases, the hero 19

27 faces not only evil incarnate in an enemy, but in his or her own inner temptations and moral conflicts. However, he or she comes out of it victorious, having defeated the inner demons as well as the outer evil. This pattern would also fit within a classic morality template, inasmuch as good wins over evil in the end. I propose, in the framework of this study, to call movies that follow such templates morally unambiguous. Basically, when a movie provides a clear opposition of good and bad within its schema, I define it as a morally unambiguous movie. In fact, I propose here to include even a third possibility within our definition of unambiguous : a movie where good and evil characters are easily identifiable, even if good does not win in the end. A clear example of this within our sample of movies is Cold Mountain. In the movie Cold Mountain, we see one of the protagonists, Inman, murder another man. This could be considered a morally reprehensible act. However, the movie gives us enough information about the victim (a rapist and a torturer amongst other things) to indicate that he deserves to be killed, and that his death is in truth an act of justice in a world in which regular systems of justice are corrupt. Thus, Inman does not lose his good guy standing, even after an act that could be morally questionable by itself. Within the schema of the story, he still is a good guy. In the end of the movie, Inman dies tragically. This could be considered a violation of the template, because good is not rewarded with a happy ending. In our opinion, this would be a too simplistic approach to understanding narratives. Cold Mountain does not necessarily violate a good vs. evil template because the end, although tragic, provides meaning for the rest of the good characters involved, and because evil is not shown triumphant either. This example helps illuminate two points about my definition of a morally unambiguous movie. First; the determination of whether a movie, as a whole, corresponds to the morally unambiguous template does not depend on isolated judgments about the morality of each act, but on the extra 20

28 evidence provided by the story s context (in the example, murder is justified by a major threat of evil). Secondly; the classification of a movie as morally unambiguous does not depend on whether good or evil wins in the end, but rather on whether there is an underlying message that a meaningful lesson can be learned from goodness. As opposed to unambiguous templates, I define ambiguous moral templates. These are, in a way, even harder to define than unambiguous templates, as they include a broader spectrum of ways in which morality plays out in the story. As opposed to unambiguous movies, in ambiguous movies it is hard for the viewer to determine who the good guys and the bad guys are. This may happen for several reasons. One possibility is that the protagonist (the one which would be thoroughly good in an unambiguous movie) has both positive and negative moral traits. For example, we may have a character, like the preacher in 21 grams, who is a former criminal and alcoholic, redeemed through newborn Christianity and community work, but who still is extremely violent to his children and wife. He accidentally runs over a couple of children killing them, and is consumed by great remorse, so he turns himself in. When he gets out of jail, however, he is cruel to his family, and finally abandons them. Is this character good? bad? beyond moral discussion? This character, as well as other throughout this movie, is not clearly classifiable as a good guy or a bad guy. The movie is not organized around that polarity. For this study, I define this kind of movie, where characters are not clearly good or bad, but the presence of moral issues and choice is clear, as a morally ambiguous movie. A second way in which a movie can make it hard to determine the good guy / bad guy structure, is by showing a character that engages in morally reprehensible actions, but also showing the detailed circumstances that lead to the moral transgressions. This pattern encourages understanding of the final actions, pity, or at least some level of emotional connection. However, one may still recognize that 21

29 the behavior is morally reprehensible per se. An example of this within my sample of movies is the film Monster, which shows the emotional neglect and abuse that leads a woman to become a serial killer; including the fact that the first murder was committed in self defense. I consider such movies to belong in the morally ambiguous category because they make it hard for audiences to fully adhere to the notion that a character is good or bad, by involving emotional identification or empathy. This emotional involvement, as I will discuss in our next section, has an impact in people s ability to make moral judgments. Research on feminist ethics, for example, shows that women, who tend to engage more in the process of understanding the motivation for moral transgressions, are less likely to make clear-cut moral judgments that people are good or bad (Gilligan, 1982). Thus, when this pattern appears in film, it can be considered to render the moral issues and characters treated there as ambiguous. Finally, a third way in which movies make it hard for spectators to engage in a good guys/bad guys schema is by showing a scheme of protagonist and antagonist in which both parties have righteous claims in a conflict. The movie shows both their viewpoints, and both characters present behaviors that vary along a spectrum of moral acceptability. The viewer is forced to change his or her viewpoint following the reasoning of each character, to the point that they can t side with either. A clear example of this is the movie House of Sand and Fog. In this movie, a man and a woman are engaged in a legal and emotional struggle for a piece of property. They both have righteous claims to the house, and the viewer also witnesses the emotional needs and specific circumstances of each character. The movie does not privilege the viewpoint of one or the other, and thus it is hard for the audience to make a judgment of who is the good guy and who is the bad guy. Thus, the moral conflict is presented as ambiguous. 22